Sir, - Kevin O'Sullivan reports that the "agricultural expert" Prof Tom Raftery of UCC "said he had yet to see any evidence to show organic produce was nutritionally better than conventional food" (The Irish Times, April 20th). He says that within the global context it was a dangerous illusion to think we could feed today's population using yesterday's methods, let alone the extra 5 billion the globe will have by the middle of the next century. He predicts this population explosion as if it were a universal truth. In any event, he seems to be still reading from the biotech industry's script.
Last May 12th, in a letter to the Examiner, Prof Raftery quoted at length from "the world's most renowned plant breeder", Prof Norman Borlaug, to persuade us of the merits of GM foods. His case seemed to boil down to choosing between the advocates of GM foods and "the scaremongers", which term apparently applied to the rest of us. He trotted out the familiar biotech industry line about GM food being the answer to the world's food shortage, when the global population doubled, but did not predict when that might occur.
Prof Raftery did not say then, and does not acknowledge now, the fact that world hunger is not due to a lack of global food levels but rather due to the lack of access to that food, as the ongoing famines vividly demonstrate. It has to do with a lack of will, a political failure to deal with the issue. What is clear is that GM food is not the answer to feeding the world's hungry.
Genetic engineering is a Wall Street science, a corporate-driven tool which, in the case of food production, does not work too well and undermines bio diversity, according to the noted Indian environmentalist Dr Vandana Shiva. Genetic engineering has moved on from being a public science-driven research tool in the 1970s to one where multinational corporations, such as Monsanto and Novartis, are focusing on less than a handful of crops. This conversion to monoculture is, of course, to the detriment of biodiversity. It would lead to the end of multiple crop outputs from farms, and put undue emphasis on marketplace yield.
According to Stephen Jackson, director of UCC's International Famine Centre, allowing multinational companies to apply their profit-centred biotechnology to "Third World" countries would unleash landlessness, hunger and social upheaval. - Yours, etc.,
Myles Crowe, Old Brewery Lane, Clonakilty, Co Cork.